Overview

The ARM968E-S is a small footprint core for low power, data intensive applications

The ARM968E-S processor is designed for hard real time applications, and provides highly deterministic performance. Within the ARM9™ processor family, the ARM968E-S processor provides the smallest footprint and highest power efficiency.

Industry standard

Over 5 Billion ARM9 processors have been shipped so far

The ARM968E-S processor is a very popular processor within the ARM9 family, and continues to be successfully deployed across a wide range of products and applications which demand highly deterministic behavior and have tight area and power budgets.

By offering stable and proven performance, it provides designers a low risk solution, with very fast time to market.

Range of applications

The ARM968E-S processor is used in a wide range of advanced digital products

Rich ecosystem of OS, RTOS, and tools support

Broadest ecosystem of compilers, debuggers and RTOS tools in the industry

Plentiful design services partners to aid in design task

Large variety of third party IP available to integrate with processors.

ARM968E-S Performance, Power & Area

Process

TSMC 130nm G

TSMC 90nm G

Optimization type

Speed Optimized

Area Optimized

Speed Optimized

Area Optimized

Standard Cell Library

ARM SC12

ARM SC9

ARM SC12

ARM SC7

Performance (Total DMIPS)

297

198

517

308

Performance (DMIPS/MHz)

1.1

1.1

1.1

1.1

Max Frequency* (MHz)

270

180

470

280

Cache Size

-

-

-

-

Area (mm2)

0.45

0.40

0.42

0.20

Power (mW/MHz)

0.14

0.11

0.11

0.06

Power Efficiency† (DMIPS/mW)

7.86

10.0

10.0

18.3

Core area, frequency range and power consumption are dependent on process, libraries and optimizations. The numbers quoted above are illustrative of synthesized cores using general purpose TSMC process technologies and ARM Physical IP standard cell libraries and RAMs.

The speed optimized implementations refer to the library choices and synthesis flow decisions and tradeoffs made in order to achieve the target frequency performance. The area optimized implementations refer to the library choices and synthesis flow decisions and tradeoffs made in order to achieve a target area density.

The ARM 32-bit instruction set is used in applications requiring high performance. ARM instructions are 32-bits wide, and are aligned on 4-byte boundaries. All ARM instructions can also be "conditionalised" to only execute when previous instructions have set a particular condition code.

Thumb is an extension to the 32-bit ARM architecture. The Thumb instruction set features a subset of the most commonly used 32-bit ARM instructions which have been compressed into 16-bit wide opcodes. On execution, these 16-bit instructions are decompressed transparently to full 32-bit ARM instructions in real time without performance loss.

Designers can use both 16-bit Thumb and 32-bit ARM instructions sets and therefore have the flexibility to emphasize performance or code size on a sub-routine level as their applications require.

Configurable Instruction and Data TCMs

The ARM968E-S processor supports highly configurable instruction and data TCMs. TCMs are typically used for applications that may not respond well to caching, such as highly deterministic or low-latency applications with finite closed-loop control. TCM accesses are deterministic and do not access the AHB. Therefore, you can use the DTCM and ITCM to store real-time, performance-critical code.

The Instruction TCM typically handles interrupts or exceptions, and the Data TCM handles data intensive tasks, such as audio or video processing. The second interface can have two memory ports to increase bandwidth and enable interleaving against incoming DMA-based data streams

The features of the TCM interface include:

Independent ITCM and DTCM sizes of 0KB or 1KB-4MB in power-of-two increments

The ARM9 family benefits from powerful DSP extensions that enable low-power, high-performance ARM9 based solutions for a broad range of software applications such as servo motor control, Voice over IP and video & audio codecs.

The ARM DSP extensions enable increased DSP performance without the need for very high clock frequencies. This performance is achieved with almost no increase in power consumption on a typical implementation. In many applications including smartphones and similar embedded systems requiring considerable signal processing, the DSP extensions can often eliminate the need for additional hardware accelerators.

Single-cycle 16x16 and 32x16 MAC implementations

2-3 x DSP performance improvement over ARM7™-based CPU products

Zero overhead saturation extension support

Instructions to load and store pairs of registers, with enhanced addressing modes

Compilers targeting the ARM architecture can use these DSP extensions to improve code-generation for standard C and C++ software, or allow software developers to explicitly request use of these extension via intrinsics or inline assembly code.

The VFP9-S coprocessor provides IEEE 754 standard-compatible operations. Designed specifically for the ARM9 processor family, the VFP9-S coprocessor provides full support of single-precision and double-precision add, subtract, multiply, divide, and multiply with accumulate operations. Conversions between floating-point data formats and ARM integer word format are provided, with special operations to perform the conversion in round-toward-zero mode for high-level language support.

The VFP9-S coprocessor provides a performance-power-area solution for embedded applications and high performance for general-purpose applications, such as Java.

The ARM968E-S DMA implements the AHB-Lite bus slave interface. It is tightly integrated with the TCM interface to prevent access contention with the processor. A dedicated AHB-lite slave DMA port and dual banked data TCM enables the processor and a DMA controller to share access to TCM. Transfer of data and code to and from the TCM is possible even while the processor is in the low-power wait-for-interrupt state.

Debug Interface

The ARM968E-S processor contains hardware extensions for advanced debugging features to facilitate application software and operating system development.

The debug extensions enable halted system debug to examine the internal state of the processor and the external state of the AHB while all other system activity continues as normal.

Monitor debug-mode operation is also supported which enables users to debug the ARM968E-S processor while critical interrupt service routines are executing.

The debug monitor program typically communicates with the debug host over the debug communications channel.

System Development

Connect to standard System IP - AMBA® interconnect compatibility for fast and efficient system design with peripherals and memories.

System IP

System IP components are essential for building complex system on chips and by utilizing ARM System IP components developers can significantly reduce development and validation cycles, saving cost and reducing time to market

The Mali™ family of products combine to provide the complete graphics stack for all embedded graphics needs, enabling device manufacturers and content developers to deliver the highest quality, cutting edge graphics solutions across the broadest range of consumer devices.

Mali-55 GPU

The Mali-55 GPU is the world’s smallest OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant GPU using the Mali tile-based rendering architecture to maximize the efficiency of energy usage in displaying graphical images and to minimize the bandwidth demands on the system.

Available in a variety of different architectures ARM Standard Cell Libraries support a wide performance range for all types of SoC designs. Designers can choose between different libraries and optimize their designs for speed, power and/or area

A broad portfolio of silicon-proven Interface IP designed to meet varying system architectures and standards. General Purpose I/O, Specialty I/O, High Speed DDR and Serial Interfaces are optimized to deliver high data throughput performance with low pin counts.

Tools Ecosystem

All ARM processors are supported by the ARM RealView® portfolio of development tools, as well as a wide range of third party tools, operating system and EDA vendors. ARM RealView tools are unique in their ability to provide solutions that span the complete development process from concept to final product deployment.

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